OER Exchange

Runs on the dedicated Exchange site. Teachers share and import through the companion local_oerclient plugin installed on their own Moodle sites.

• Catalogue — publish, browse, search and structure-preview the courses and activities shared from client sites, before anyone imports them.
• Identity — site registration with administrator approval for client sites, plus a personal account-linking handshake, so that shares and reviews are attributed to a real Exchange account.
• Licensing — Creative Commons, through core's license_manager. An administrator chooses which licences sharing may use (the CC set by default); the choice is enforced on every publish path and advertised to client sites.
• Community — adaptation-story reviews, reports and a moderation queue. A moderator's takedown is a state of its own that the author can neither lift nor delete, so a complaint and the record of it survive the person it is about; the queue can restore the resource.
• Author control — authors hide, show, delete and replace the file of their own resources, and may decline sandbox availability with a reason. The Exchange serves exactly one version per resource: an update supersedes the previous one, keeping the catalogue entry, its link and its reviews.
• Co-authors — an author can name further authors by username or email address, each holding the same rights as the creator. Everyone added is notified, and is credited publicly on the resource page.
• Educator profiles — a shareable profile page per educator (bio, expertise, badges, portfolio links, metrics and a resource grid), created automatically on their first published resource, with author attribution and an editable thumbnail on every resource.
• Abandoned courseware (off by default) — a nightly check warns the author of any published resource left unmaintained past a configurable threshold (default two years). They can update it, or press a one-click "Still fresh" button; if neither happens within a configurable grace period (default 60 days) the resource leaves the catalogue into the moderation queue's restorable list, never irreversibly.
• Sandbox integration — builds Moodle Playground (in-browser, WASM) trial launch URLs, so a visitor can try a resource before importing it. Nothing is executed server-side.

Client sites talk to the Exchange through a custom web service of six functions, split between a per-site token and each teacher's personal token.

Privacy is implemented through the full Moodle privacy API, including a deletion path that genuinely removes a departing user's shared courseware rather than anonymising it, leaving a tombstone so that existing links degrade gracefully instead of breaking.